The digital afterlife: a very expensive, advert-filled existence?

If you count yourself as a geek, then you’ve no doubt thought about technology progressing to the point where uploading your brain to a computer is possible. Robots continue to improve both in intelligence and physical actions, hard drives now hold terabytes of data and continue to get bigger, and the Internet has already shown us how diverse and rewarding digital communication with others can be. So my brain stored on a server and interacting online doesn’t sound outside the realms of possibility in a few decades.

Tom Scott has taken that idea one stage further and produced a video called “Welcome to Life.” It shows one view of what a digital afterlife might be like, but more specifically, what that first after death interaction will consist of. And I have to admit it acts as a bit of a reality check.

Any life after death in digital form will inevitably cost money, and it will be up to the individual who died to have the money to fund that second life. And just like today where we select the online services we want to use, what level of service we want, and what content we are willing to pay for, Tom’s video tweaks that for actual life.

As well as paying for continuing to be alive, meaning the costs of running the server you are stored on, there’s the small matter of the contents of your brain. Remember any book you’ve read or scenes from a movie you watched while physically alive? There will be a copyright charge for continuing to remember them. And of course your thought patterns will be filtered so as not to be offensive to others. You won’t be exactly the same person and you’ll probably end up working in some capacity to ensure continued service can be funded.

A digital afterlife seems like a lot less fun after watching that video. It will require I die with a large sum of money in the bank, my afterlife could be controlled by a company like Google, and if I run out of funds my provider will limit what I can do while increasing the amount of adverts I see. And don’t forget those ads will be extremely well targeted seeing as your entire mind is online and searchable because of those terms and conditions you signed to keep “living.”